Coming Out, Part 2. The Rest of the World

When last we left our heroine:

Okay...not so much. No being tied to the railroad tracks or carried away by Snidely Whiplash's sister, Snooty Whiplash. Not that Snooty would have talked to me anyway.  I'm not very cool.

So...coming out to the rest of the world.

Remember I'd been living for years in a small town in Nowhere, IL. My lesbian options were slim. After The Best Ex-Husband Ever and I got divorced, I spent some time alone. I didn't have a clue where actual lesbians were to be found in Nowhere, but it was clear there were none in Alto Pass. Luckily two things fell into my path: the Internet and the Forest Service.

The Internet gave me access to message boards full of lesbians who were smart and kind and supportive. I found a community of woman to talk about life with who could understand what I was going through and talk about it without being judgmental (Compare that to the AOL boards of the last few years. Shocking, eh?)

I fell into my Forest Service job accidentally. I had a friend who worked for the Forest Service and after my divorce I was working at a crappy student apartment complex in Carbondale, showing apartments, answering the phones, and hauling away the detritus of students who skipped out on their rent. I hated the job, but it paid every week.

My friend Kelly worked for the Forest Service Ranger District in Jonesboro, IL and she thought she could get me on for the summer because of my Biology degree. Nevermind it was a microbiology degree, like so many jobs, the degree was just to get you through the door. I got hired as a summer tech and found the coolest thing ever: the Forest Service is lousy with lesbians! You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a lesbian in a sporty green uniform. It was like a smorgasbord of healthy, tanned, outdoorsy dykes with pickup trucks, chainsaws, steel toed boots and hardhats. Dykes who liked power tools and backhoes and firefighting and all the finer things in life. It was dyke heaven, dyke mecca.  It was dyketastic!

That is, of course, where I found my first girlfriend. She wasn't really much of a girlfriend anyway, she was more like a lesbian spirit guide. She introduced me to lesbians culture and more importantly, to lesbian sex. And what a brilliant idea that was!. If someone could bottle it and sell by the half ounce, they'd be rich in a week. 

She was older than me and farther up the F.S. chain of command, but I was a lot hotter back then, so it sort of evened itself out on the power scale. She got five extra points for income and five more for experience, but I got ten for hotness.

I met my first live-in girlfriend when I went back to school for a graduate degree after I figured out that no one could raise three kids on $8 an hour. I courted her with my Internet access, my keen grasp of calc-based Physics and my excellent Forest Service tan, and in short order she moved in with me.  At this point, two girlfriends and three years down the road, I was still not out. That is, until the day that my neighbor Molly came to the door. Katie answered it. and said, "My mommy can't come to the door right now. She's taking a nap with Carol."  I looked over at Carol and said, "Well...we're out."

It's a small town. By the time I put my pants on, there wasn't anyone over 10 years old within a five mile radius that didn't know I was a lesbian.